‘The Electric Kiss’ Review: Pierre Salvadori’s Fizzy Carnival Saga Overstays Its Welcome

Cannes: The festival's opening night selection contains the potential for several fine films, but fails to commit to being any of them.

Too many inputs overcharge Pierre Salvadori’s “The Electric Kiss,” an otherwise low-key, low-stakes charmer that opens this year’s Cannes Film Festival with only a faint spark.

No shortage of fine, fizzy films already exist within the confines of this 122-minute romp, but Salvadori (not without reason) recognizes that committing to any one means sacrificing the others. Instead, he folds them together into a period rom-com that badly overstays its welcome, cycling through inspired detours and frustrating dead ends as it unevenly channels several competing sensibilities before eventually fizzling out.

Still, credit the film for innovation: while all-star casts are hardly uncommon on the Cannes red carpet, “The Electric Kiss” ups the ante with an equal wattage of screenwriters. Rebecca Zlotowski (“A Private Life”) and Robin Campillo (“BPM”) share story credits alongside Benjamin Charbit (“The Beast”) and longtime collaborators Salvadori and Benoît Graffin, together overcrowding a carny-and-conman comedy that strains a little too hard for the Lubitsch touch.

The year is 1920, and the carnival has come to town. Just beyond the respectable edges of Paris, among the soothsayers and strongmen, works Suzanne (Anaïs Demoustier). Inside the fairgrounds she’s known as Venus Electrificata, a flapper femme fatale perched atop a low-voltage platform, ready to deliver a mild shock to any punter willing to spend a few francs for a kiss. “Love is pain, love is ecstasy,” shouts the act’s barker (Gustave Kervern), a small-time hustler who keeps Suzanne in near-indentured servitude while running the attraction like a PG-rated pimp.

Understandably, Suzanne wants out. Fortuitously, she finds a possible escape by moonlighting as a medium for the grieving artist Antoine Balestro (Pio Marmaï). Wracked with guilt, flush with cash, and never far from a drink, the widower will pay any price to reconnect with his dearly departed muse — and so too will his frustrated gallerist (Gilles Lellouche), who sees the fake medium as the ideal catalyst for getting his top earner back to work. There’s money to be made from a drunken widower, but a productive painter promises wealth on an entirely different scale. And what difference does it make for Suzanne, who already spends her days functioning as a kind of conduit?

“The Electric Kiss” peaks early, finding its surest and most entertaining footing as the gal and the gallerist set their con in motion. For all the moving parts and elaborate period design, Salvadori finds grace in the simplest visual language when cutting between two perfectly cast faces in close-up. Of all contemporary Gallic stars, Lellouche and Demoustier already feel slightly out of time, their features recalling both silent-era performers and screwball archetypes. Salvadori leans into it, framing Demoustier’s wide eyes and sharp cheekbones beneath a Louise Brooks bob, while fitting Lellouche’s rectangular head with a mustache that somehow makes him seem even more French. Watching the pair scheme in crisp shot-reverse-shot carries much of the film’s easy charm, like witnessing a pair of Al Hirschfeld caricatures suddenly brought to life.

“The Electric Kiss” soon stumbles, however, once it introduces a new narrative strand and a fourth key player. To sustain her ruse, Suzanne discovers volumes of diaries written by the painter’s late wife. From there, the film plunges into flashback, following Irène (Vimala Pons) as she falls in love and gradually transforms a dissolute artist into a great modernist painter. Pons is, as ever, an excellent comic performer, but the film does her no favors in the way it stacks its two narrative drives. On one hand, there is the present-day grift; on the other, a time-hopping love triangle between a girl, a guy, and a ghost. If both strands hew to familiar rom-com rhythms — heck, the title alone signals where things are headed — the film still seems to forget the genre’s most basic geometry: if three’s a party, four’s a crowd.

Unable to neatly reconcile its two narrative premises, the film loses momentum, pushing well past the brisk runtime and zippy pace this kind of material usually depends on. That overextension also affects tone, as Salvadori never quite settles on how sharp the film should be. “The Electric Kiss” may build this tension into its very title, promising both pleasure and pain, but the finished product never quite strikes that balance. Once the bubbles fade and the doldrums set in, one is left thinking back to the film’s many collaborators, wondering who threaded in its darker undertow — as Suzanne’s backstory and her relationship with her carny master carry an unmistakable strain of cruelty and latent sadomasochism — and who, by contrast, insisted on yet another sequence of lovers frolicking in sunlit meadows.

For his part, Salvadori seems content to shoot it all and see what lands, veering between the ominous and the earnest, generosity and genuine menace. Motivations and motifs shift from scene to scene, but what does it matter when life is a carnival and the cast is so winning? Fair enough, perhaps, but take heed: this particular attraction comes with whiplash.

Grade: C

“The Electric Kiss” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.

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